US technology center to combat blackouts with SiC
Engineers at the University of Arkansas (UA) have received $1 million from the US government to help set up a technology center that will develop SiC chips to upgrade the country's electrical power grid.
The National Center for Reliable Electrical Power has been established in direct response to the 2003 power blackout that hit much of the northeastern US.
Alan Mantooth, a UA professor of electrical engineering and director of the center, said: "We have to limit potentially catastrophic events so that people don't get hurt and equipment doesn't get destroyed."
During the 2003 power outage, obsolete electro-mechanical current limiters that were supposed to contain surges in power were blamed for failing to contain the blackout.
Mantooth explained that the 2003 power outage, which cost billions of dollars, was triggered by a storm over Ohio that felled trees onto transmission cables. The fallen trees caused a huge power surge that the current limiters should have contained by grounding the charge.
Instead, those mechanical switches failed or did not function quickly enough. The result was a cascade of surging currents that spread from Ohio to hit New York City and Detroit, as well as the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Toronto. Nuclear power stations in the states of New York and Ohio were forced to shut down and air traffic into affected airports had to be diverted.
"Even with the electro-mechanical switches functioning properly, the entire process is too slow," said Mantooth.
Because SiC chips can react to power surges faster than mechanical devices, as well as withstand higher voltages and operate at higher temperatures, they have been identified as one of the solutions to the power grid problem.
"We want to get the electric system of our country to react like a computer "“ at electrical speeds, not mechanical speeds," said Mantooth. "The catastrophe of the [2003] blackout wasn't the trees that fell on power lines. It was the cascading effect."
"None of the built-in protection devices reacted quickly enough or properly. What you need is faster-acting, more reliable, purely electrical systems "“ what we refer to as solid-state solutions."
Mantooth and his UA colleagues will generate mathematical models of SiC devices to simulate the design of large electrical systems. Those devices will then be tested and packaged to ensure that they don't break down when subjected to high voltages and currents.
Teams at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Tennessee, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech have received funding for related research.
